An auspiciously Heavy beginning

There’s a belief, to which I absolutely adhere, that it’s best to be exposed to horrific events at a tender age. This is why my mother took me to a stranger’s wake at age four. (Have at it, psychoanalysts.) By acclimating ourselves as early as possible to the fact that inexplicable, painful things happen, we develop game plans – coping mechanisms, if you want to assign jargon to it. More insidiously, our very personalities warp to accommodate and overcome what is beyond control.

So, while I may have occasionally envied my oblivious, apparently happy and secure peers while growing up, the point is that lots of these people are completely destroyed when they realize – sometimes very, very far down the line – that they are living in a world which they suddenly find completely incomprehensible. And in my better moments, I don’t envy them anymore. Because I’ve known this for as long as I can remember. And that’s why I’m happy that, when I was too young to realize how very wrong it was, I was exposed to Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” video.

Now, everyone agrees that this is not normal by any identifiable standard. To understand my special situation, however, you should know that I was born on, and grew up near, a naval base. I saw these ships. I knew them. In terms a four year old child can understand, it was explained to me that these things are like metropolises unto themselves: the men are confined onboard for months at a time; they get haircuts on them; they even have restaurants. Real restaurants: McDonald’s, Pizza Hut. As far as I was concerned, battleships were simultaneously a world apart and immanently bound to the regular one that they shadowed. And this was happening on one. I was familiar with Cher; her cassette was on pretty regular rotation in my mom’s Corolla. Both Cher and battleships came within the sphere of my immediate experience. As far as I knew, this was happening right down the street.

I’m not saying that Cher offended my infant morality or threatened my orientation within society – quite the opposite. I’m pointing out that, at this point in my life, I had no such orientation. I simply observed. And this is what I observed. And I haven’t found reason to supplant that approach with anything better. Any system that can explain to me why Cher is trotting her tatted ass up and down the deck of a battleship is bound to be so reductionist that it will exclude much that is equally worth knowing. I crave narrative, I do. But, thanks to Cher (in half seriousness), I remain deeply mistrustful of it. Confronted with absurdity, a natural enough reaction is to draw lines between anecdotes. Once a satisfying story emerges, it can be impossible to revise without doing some real damage. Yet I don’t think this is a viable strategy for a life - or a blog. If I got anything out of grad school other than confirmation that I think way too much, it’s that life isn’t art. If it were, we wouldn’t need art. Life is another genre. The world is a fucking strange place. It’s grotesque, and it’s weird, and the tragedy would be missing that by denying it.